Outliers

The Story of Success

Little, Brown; 309 pages; $27.99

When Malcolm Gladwell's first book, "The Tipping Point," was published in 2000, I made it required reading for students. I still assign it, and eight years later it's still a global best-seller. "Blink," his exploration of deliberate and instinctive thinking, didn't have the same electrifying effect on me, but it also became a best-seller and solidified Gladwell's reputation as a thinker who could write equally well about science and culture, technology and fashion.

Now, in "Outliers," which is about the myths and the realities of success, he comes closer than ever before to telling his own unique rags-to-riches story. While he doesn't describe the upward-bound journey that took him from England to Canada to New York, he writes eloquently about his English father and Jamaican mother, and about his own rich cultural legacy that helped pave the way for his literary acclaim.

In "The Tipping Point," Gladwell wrote about the few extraordinary people who create trends and bring marginal styles to the mainstream. He showed how small things make a big difference, and demonstrated that if messages are to have an impact they must be "sticky."

In his new book, he writes again about exceptional individuals, or "outliers," as he calls them: star athletes, computer wizards and hotshot lawyers. With remarkable ease, he moves from New York corporations to Chinese rice paddies, the Beatles to Bill Gates, ice hockey to airplane crashes. He seems to be at home everywhere, and he finds fertile ground for research in the most unlikely places; small towns like Roseto, Pa., where the social network keeps people healthy; and Harlan, Ky., where the residents are prisoners of inherited attitudes.

Part psychologist, part sociologist and investigative reporter, Gladwell tells intriguing tales about people who overcome adversity: children of Jewish immigrants; talented musicians from the back streets of Liverpool, England; and flight attendants from Korea. With relentless curiosity and a keen fascination with significant details, he focuses on trends and illuminates the larger lessons he wants everyone to learn. Jargon never rears its head, which in part explains his enduring popularity.

What holds together the divergent people, places and topics is Gladwell's search for the keys to success, and his determination to offer practical suggestions. With hard work, persistence and a combination of luck and social resources, everyone can rise above poverty, ignorance and the trough of failure, he insists. If you miss his message the first time, he repeats it again and again.

"Outliers says that success follows a predictable course," he writes. "It is not the brightest who succeed." He adds that the successful are "those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them." For Gladwell, community, family, schools and colleges are more important than talent or genius. It's what we do with our gifts that matters, not IQ or the income of parents.

More cantankerous here than before, Gladwell rebukes Americans for the excesses of individualism and criticizes the flaws in the public school system. "The way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards," he says. "The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it."

At times, his conclusions don't seem to be warranted by the facts. One wonders, for example, if all the top-notch 20th century New York Jewish lawyers really were born in the early 1930s, as he claims, and if demographics really determine who gets ahead and who doesn't, as he suggests. "Outliers" can also read like the fairy tales he dislikes. "If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires," he writes. That seems to have been true for him, but it hasn't been true for many others.

Still, "Outliers" is unabashedly inspiring. Education is at its vital heart; teachers and parents ought to put it on Christmas lists and bring it to PTA meetings. The students in my own classes, many of whom never seize opportunities, and blame others for failures, would benefit greatly by reading Gladwell's provocative and practical book about the landscape of success.